First of all, how do people adult? I mean, we both have 40-hour-plus careers, but we don’t have kids and our social lives aren’t nearly as demanding as they used to be when we were whippersnappers with livers of steel. How does anyone work, care for a house, raise children, and accomplish … um, things?!
This is the story of how hard it was to plant our tree.
Kate here. It is my firmly-held belief that new homes should be commemorated with tree plantings, so has been my consistent demand since we moved into our townhome that we needed to plant a tree within the first month. Now, I’m a dig-first-ask-questions-later sort of landscape architect, so thank goodness I have Indigo to temper me. To be fair, Indigo is a panic-first-stop-researching-and-get-it-done-only-when-they-take-Pinterest-from-my-cold-head-hands sort of person, so anyway, we compromised on planting a tree within the first year.
Lucky us, Trees Atlanta held its native plant sale this October. We were able to talk with their knowledgable volunteers and find a tree that would fit in the large shadow of our white oak (yay), be non-invasive (double yay), and even produce flowers (yay yay yay). We went home with a butterfly magnolia sapling hanging out the car window, named her Dame Maggie Smithnolia; long live the queen.
Even more lucky, my parents were visiting at the time and they reminded us to call the call-before-you-dig hotline. As it turns out, our side yard is a massive spiderweb of utility lines, including the lines to what looks like the power for our entire row of houses. We had to plant Maggie pretty close to the fence to find a spot big and sunny enough for her.
From the reading we did online, we saw that it is not recommended to treat your soil before planting a tree, which was hard to abide by, especially after discovering that our side yard is just an inch-thin layer of topsoil over hard, compacted red clay. It truly seems like digging through brick. I can’t stop picturing her trying to grow roots in that mess and struggling to push them through. Of course, to make it easier for her to extend her roots, we dug a hole as deep and three times as wide as the dirt she came potted in.
We had a new, sharp shovel (and a tiny old dull one that filled us with pocket-sized rage) and a lopper, so we were able to cut through most of the vines and tree roots in this h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e soil, but we did have one huge root from the gigantic, well-established white oak that sits about 25 feet away. Old trees are like honey badgers; they don’t give a fuck what your plans are, they were there first. We couldn’t get through it. However, one quick visit to our favorite hardware store later and the day was saved by Indigo’s new favorite tool: the mattock.
The mattock allowed us to chop through the big old tree root and break up the rock-hard clumps of soil so that Dame Maggie has the best chance for flourishing in the future.
From reading online, we learned that butterfly magnolias shouldn’t be planted too deep (just to the top of the dirt from the planter it came in) and should not have their root ball broken up, as is recommended for some other trees to stimulate root growth. It was so satisfying to plop her directly into her new home in the ground! We sorted out the hardest chunks of clay and filled the rest of the broken-up dirt back around the tree in the hole. We had already purchased pine chips for mulch, so we poured those around over the area we had just filled in, being careful not to crowd her trunk.
We’ve been watering her every day and her leaves seem to have stopped dying just short of the half of the leaves that we read could be common, so we think she’s taking to her new spot. After two weeks, we’re ready to drop back to every other day watering, but a cool and rainy fall have been doing our work for us this week.
In the end, it took us an embarrassing amount of time to dig this hole and get Maggie planted, but we managed it, and it was very fun to dig in the dirt together. Plus, I am very impressed with Indigo’s mattock prowess.
You’ve made it to the end of the post, dear reader, and here is your reward. Anyone want to see the size of that tree root?
